TRANSPLANT FALLS IN LOVE WITH OCEANSIDE, HISTORY

It’s a time to think about our nation’s history, but this week also has been a time to reflect on Oceanside’s as well because the city celebrated its 125th anniversary Wednesday.

And local residents can thank a transplant from Kansas for a lot of knowledge about their own community’s past.

When Kristi Hawthorne was a young wife in Lawrence, Kan., a Marine recruiter told her then-husband, in the process of enlisting, that he probably would be stationed at Camp Pendleton, but “whatever you do, do not live in Oceanside,” he advised.

It was a crime-ridden military town, the recruiter said.

She was devastated to find out that although he had obtained military housing, it was not on the base but at Sterling Homes within the city limits.

“I had never seen a cockroach before in my life,” she said, and the walls were so thin in the World War II-era housing, where she lived from 1983 to 1986, that she could hear the neighbors next door shuffling cards.

But she also began a 30-year love affair with Ocean-side. “It’s fun to talk about Oceanside,” Hawthorne said in a recent interview. “I never get tired of it.”

She is events coordinator for the Oceanside Chamber of Commerce.

Hawthorne caught the local-history bug from her boss in the 1980s, John Daley, a native of Oceanside. He had hired Hawthorne as a secretary for his real-estate business.

(He’s probably better-known now as the co-owner of the 101 Cafe.)

Daley sent her to do some research at the old city library in what once was a Safeway grocery store on the current Civic Center Drive east of Coast Highway.

She had lived in Oceanside for four years but had never been to the library.

Daley wanted to know about an old pier. The librarian told Hawthorne there wasn’t much material available except for microfilm of an old newspaper, the South Oceanside Diamond.

She hadn’t used microfilm before and felt that she was one of the few people ever to review the newspaper files, but she was hooked then and there.

“I loved every second of it, every column, every word,” she said.

It was in those old files that Hawthorne learned of the existence of an old 19th century commercial wharf at the end of what then was Couts Street, now Wisconsin.

She printed out pages and pages from the microfilm. “I was fascinated,” she said.

In those pre-computer days, Hawthorne began compiling notebooks full of information. She would transcribe it from the newspaper clippings, keeping it in chronological order.

“It may be a silly thing,” Hawthorne said, “but when I was typing it up, (the information) goes in my memory, it is imprinted in my brain.” And then when she inputed the information again, this time into the computer, now “it was indelible in my brain.”

She has more than 8,000 entries in her biographical file alone.

The Oceanside Historical Society was founded in 1985, before Hawthorne’s involvement, but she joined a couple of years later, and has been a stalwart ever since, and is the group’s current president.

“I did not do anything but attend a meeting,” Hawthorne said, “but my perception of Oceanside changed.”

She met community leaders such as Ernie Taylor, Lois and Howard Richardson, Lucy Chavez and the Martin family, correcting her perception that the vast majority of residents were “transplants like me.”

“I realized that there were people born and raised here,” she said. “I wanted Oceanside to be my hometown, too.”

She did research for the book “Crest of the Wave,” written for the city’s 100th anniversary in 1988 and wrote “Oceanside: Where Life Is Worth Living” in 2000. She wrote the current 125th anniversary magazine.

Yet Hawthorne said at one time she was “content to live in Kansas for the rest of my life.”

Lola Sherman is a freelance writer. Contact her at lola@ seaside-media-services.com